Not a Fairy Tale
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: A chill had taken root in her soul. It wasn't supposed to be like this. A Kara Thrace/Sam Anders fic


She shivered, the culmination of the cold breeze wafting in from the bay, the drizzle that clung to her hair and skin, and the chill that had taken root in her soul.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

_A blue and white jewel, set in velvet midnight. She flies in closer and closer until that midnight brightens. The blue and white morphs into sky and cloud, leavened with the green of trees that sway with the movement of the atmosphere and the passage of her bird, which nearly brushes the tops of those trees. Far off in the distance but coming closer with every second, buildings of glass and steel rise high into that blue, blue sky, reaching as though to touch the clouds._

Everything was dull and gray: the clouds, the light, the water lapping at the rocks and sand. Kara thought that the sky above those clouds must surely be as gray and lifeless as the planet on which she now stood. _"You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace,"_ whispered a voice in her head. _"You will lead them all to their end."_ Again, she shivered, remembering the surprisingly gentle caress of the Hybrid's (always with a capital "H") palm on her cheek, the almost joy in her eyes.

Kara took a step toward the water. Eyes wide, she looked up at the underside of a ruined bridge and then down to the rocky beach below. "Did I do this?" she breathed, her words whisked away by the same breeze that blew a lock of hair into the corner of her mouth. She irritably brushed it away.

The others had all gone back up to their respective ships, not wanting to stay on this devastated rock, or they had retreated further inland, away from the blasted shore. But Kara had stayed where she was, too numb to move forward to whatever must come next, too stubborn to simply lie down and die. Hadn't she done that already, anyway?

_The mandala swirls around her, buffeting her ship like a leaf in a storm, and she wonders if it will hurt when her Viper finally shakes itself apart. Half-remembered lessons from the academy tell her that she'll likely be dead before that happens so it will forever be a moot point. Lee's voice is desperate as he calls her name over and over, each repetition of syllables more frantic than the last. A whiff of scent, incense and sweat, ghosts by her nose and she catches a flicker of white light from the corner of her eyes, there and then not._

"_Kara." Calm and steady: Leoben's voice, not Lee's._

Water lapped at the rocks below where Kara stood. There was no birdsong, no sound of insects or of traffic or of anything at all alive, just the water and the wind as it whistled and moaned through the structure of the wrecked bridge, all rusty metal, twisted and torn. She took a step and her knee, the one injured first one lifetime ago playing Pyramid and then another being dragged across the surface of a rocky moon, protested the movement. The cold and damp had sunk deep, her muscles and tendons stiffening as she stood.

"Frak this." Ignoring the momentary pain, Kara strode across the rocky beach for several steps, but then stopped, pulling in a deep breath.

His back was to her and the wind blew in the wrong direction for him to hear her from this distance. Sam crouched down on the beach, staring across the water. As she watched, he made a sharp motion with his right arm and a moment later four splashes appeared, one after the other, disturbing the wind-raised ripples of gray water as a stone skipped across its surface. Another sharp movement, more forceful than the first, resulted in seven skips of stone across water as the lonely wind sang through rusted girders and beams.

Thrusting cold hands into felt-lined pockets, Kara took a step forward and then another, picking her way slowly, carefully across the slippery rocks and chunks of asphalt, shed by the bridge above. She closed half the distance to Sam before she had to take her hands out of her pockets to steady herself on a an unbroken concrete footer, cold and rough beneath her fingers. The manmade stone leached the heat from her hand as she stood there, leaving it aching.

Close enough to see the wind play with his hair, lifting it and rearranging it at random, the ache from the cold turned into another kind of ache entirely. She wanted to touch that soft hair, bury her fingers in it, burrow beneath his coat to let his heat warm her. He'd let her, she knew. Wrap those arms around her and let her feel safe and warm and loved.

But it was all a lie. Samuel T. Anders, former Caprica Buccaneer, leader of the human resistance on first Caprica and then on its replacement, nugget Viper pilot in the Colonial Fleet (and she still wondered how the hell that had happened), husband to Kara Thrace, was a Cylon.

A frakking Cylon.

Suddenly angry, Kara swiped a cold hand at the moisture seeping from her eyes, blaming it on that icy wind, nothing more.

"I tried to tell you, Kara." His voice startled her, for he hadn't moved, hadn't given her any indication that he knew she was there. She shoved away from her concrete support and, not caring that the footing was treacherously uneven, stalked across the beach toward Sam. She came to a stop not quite close enough to touch him.

"You should've tried harder, Sammy."

He launched another stone into the water, achieving only one skip across the surface, and reached without looking to pull another from the stack of flat rocks piled beside him. "Yeah, I should've."

He still hadn't looked at her, this Cylon she was married to. She could just imagine Helo saying "I told you so," except that he wouldn't. Sharon, maybe, but not Helo. Just as suddenly as her anger had swept over her, it faded away, leaving her feeling drained. She'd wanted, _needed _an argument, but Sam seemed as numb and empty as she felt, and that was a very _human_ thing.

Two more steps brought her to him and she dropped down by his side, wrapping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees, not caring if the cold and damp seeped up from the ground through her uniform. She stared out across the water at the distant shore with its twisted wreckage, a mirror to the wreckage in which she and Sam sat. A rattling and scraping rose above the sound of the waves lapping at the rocky shore and she glanced over to see that Sam had transferred his stack of stones from his right to his left so that Kara could reach them, too.

She rolled her head so that she could see him more clearly, look at that strong profile, at once familiar and alien. It would be so easy to reach out a hand, run her palm or knuckles across the light stubble on his cheek, his jaw. So easy, but in the end, she didn't move. After a moment, he pulled his gaze away from that still, gray horizon to look down at her. Kara didn't know what to say, what to do, how to deal, and so she did the only thing that made sense, just then.

The stone was cold as she rolled it around in her hand. Cold, and gritty from the sand clinging to its smooth, damp surface. Slowly it warmed from the touch of her skin. Calculating distance and windage, she manipulated the stone until she judged it to be at a good angle between her fingers and, with a sharp motion, released it.

"Five. Not bad."

"Guess I'd do better with an on-board computer, huh?" She cast him a sidelong glance. "Like you?"

Sam made a sound that she suspected was a choked-off laugh, but his expression didn't change. Other than that, he made no answer; just let loose another flat stone to skip lightly over the water's surface. It made six skips before disappearing. Kara drew another from the stack and sent it sailing. As with her first, it skipped five times.

"Hell, at least I'm consistent."

For several minutes, they sat there side by side, skipping stones. Kara didn't keep track of how many she threw or how many skips she achieved, any more than she did the passage of time. When the stones Sam had collected eventually ran out, the two of them stayed where they were, listening to the silence and watching the mist roll in across the water.

_Warm air caresses her cheeks, plays with her hair, which came loose from its tail when she removed her helmet. Air warm from the summer sun, suffused with the scent of flowers and grass and trees, the scent of which she hasn't experienced in years._

As the mist rolled in, the air grew colder, wetter, but still Kara made no move to leave. This was Earth. This was the place to which she had led them all, but it wasn't the place she'd left. _I did this,_ she thought, but didn't say aloud.

"This isn't your fault, Kara."

She looked over at him again and saw the concern in his eyes, vivid blue in the misty air. She turned away, back toward her view of that desolate shore. "What? Do you read minds now, too, Sam?" The question should have been ironic, sarcastic, but instead it was merely curious, her focus more on the remembered silkiness of his hair when she'd wind her fingers through it, the softness of his breath just before he'd kiss her, the heat of his skin as he'd move in so close it became hard to tell where she ended and he began.

Had it all been a lie? A matter of programming? She thought of Karl and Sharon, human and cylon, what they'd created between them. Not just a child, but a life. She shifted, turned a little more toward the cylon, toward _her_ cylon. Sam was a cylon (how could she not have known?), but what was she? Was she even human anymore?

The mist grew weightier, turned into rain, cold and unpleasant, but still Kara made no move to leave, just wrapped her arms tighter around her knees.

"I should have told you, Kara." Sam's voice was low, just loud enough to be heard over the soft spatter of rain. "When you… disappeared—"

"When I died, you mean?"

"— it was like everything in my life spun out of control. Nothing was right. Nothing made sense."

She laid her head on her knees, closed her eyes against the cold water dripping into them. It wasn't like she could see anything more, anyway. Beside her, she heard Sam shift and she knew that he faced her now.

"I was in Joe's when I heard the music for the first time." _Music? What the frak is he talking about?_ "It was like a radio that wasn't quite tuned to the right frequency. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was when we were getting close to that nebula. And it grew stronger, but by then I knew that I was the only one hearing it. Or at least, I thought I was. Hell, I thought I was going crazy."

_The music. A haunting melody, just out of reach, fading as they shift away from their goal, intensifying as they shift back. But the course changes toward the music grow farther apart, the shifts away more frequent and the music fades, but not the need to reach for it, to find its source. The need becomes an itch that she can't scratch. The itch turns to pain. And panic. And obsession._

"But you weren't," she whispered.

"It got so loud," he continued and she thought that maybe he hadn't heard her, "that it was like something trying to claw its way out of my head. All I could think about was shutting it up, finding it and making it frakking stop. But when I got there… When I got to where it was leading me, I wasn't alone."

The rain fell steadily, no sign of letting up any time soon. The sky grew darker, but Kara didn't know if that was because of the rain or because they'd sat there for so long that afternoon was turning toward night.

"I wanted to tell you, Kara. When you came back. You came back. You weren't dead." _But I think I was, Sammy._ "You were alive, and I was so frakking happy to see you and then…" He swallowed hard enough that she could hear it. "And then you were telling me that if you found out I was a cylon, you'd put a bullet between my eyes."

She almost opened her eyes, almost looked over at him, but she didn't.

"I believed you, Kara."

She remembered. The conversation, the hurt and anger at no one believing her except for Sam and Lee, at the fact that neither of them had taken her picture down from that frakking wall, the almost rage at Roslin's stubborn insistence that they all head away from where Kara knew – _knew _– they should go and Adama listening to her.

_I wouldn't have done it, Sam. It was just talk. Not that I believed you were a cylon, but that I knew that it didn't have to be that way, that cylons weren't evil – just look at Sharon. I wouldn't have done it._

Still curled in tightly, protectively on herself, Kara heard Sam push himself up from the rocks. _There's been too much death. _She knew that he stood there, watching her, waiting for her to say something. _And I didn't want to lose you again_. Anything.

_I love you, Sam._

But in the end, she said nothing and he slowly walked away.


End file.
